Did Mohammed exist?

Islam claims that, during his lifetime, Mohammed took a night journey on a flying steed, called al Buraq, to Jerusalem to the Farthest (al-Aqsa) Mosque.  The irony is that, according to Muslim sources, there was no mosque in Jerusalem for Mohammed to visit.  So why are they fighting over what never was?

Official Muslim history says Mohammed died in 632 AD – if one uses the Islamic calendar, the year 10.  Of this, there is no debate among imams, mullahs, Shi'a, Sunni, Wahhabi, Sufi, etc.  By every account, Western or Islamic, Arab armies did not reach Byzantine Roman Christian Jerusalem until 636 AD of our calendar, to immediately set a siege.  The Arabs did not enter in until 637 AD, when Christians finally surrendered the city.

Almost five years after Mohammed's death.  Five years!

Even were one to accept Islam, there were no mosques in Jerusalem until after Mohammed's death.  Whenever and wherever Mohammed made his night journey, al-Aqsa could not have been in Jerusalem.

This is only if one accepts Islam.  If one does not accept Islam, the story unravels even further.

Western deconstructionists now question the very existence of Islam's Mohammed.  The British historian Tom Holland and America's Robert Spencer  have done masterful jobs pointing out that the Mohammed of the Koran is a collection of biographic myths, appended centuries later.  The Christian apologist Jay Smith has made a career of deflating Islamic claims.  All three trace the legends of Mohammed back to the fertile imagination of Abd al Malik, the fifth caliph of the new Arab Empire – an empire that did not even call itself Muslim originally.

Was there even a Mohammed?

Probably!  But the Koran exaggerates and inflates his life.  And his teachings?  In fact, much of Koranic doctrine can be traced to then centuries-old Gnostic texts that arose after the birth of Christianity.

That is it. Soon after Christianity started, counterfeit Gnostic gospels arose in the second century.  These were discredited early on by the Church, but the ridiculous legends remained floating around among the Arabs.  Mohammed plagiarized from counterfeits for his own political motives.  Hence, the Koran, rather than being revealed wisdom from God, was rather a bastardized recompilation of earlier counterfeits, which Mohammed jumbled for his own ends.  What astounds us is that Mohammed used such ridiculous sources to counterfeit from.

Further aggravating this are the Koranic references to Mecca that have been shown could apply only to the Nabateans in Petra.  The Koran mentions olives, which do not grow in Mecca.  The earliest mosques pointed to Petra, not Mecca.

Did Mohammed exist?  If he did, was Mohammed from Petra, or did he borrow Petra sources?  We know he borrowed from the Gnostics.  And why doesn't Mecca show up on any maps until 900 AD?

But now, for the absolute coup de grace: "The 'Birmingham Koran' fragment that could shake Islam after carbon-dating suggests it is OLDER than the Prophet Muhammad"

Islam, and its prophet, may be a total fraud.

Of course, a lot of this is arcane stuff.  The average Westerner is not going to learn Arabic, nor its myriad ancient dialects, to source this myth out.  Nor, for that matter, will the modern Muslim.

But a Muslim can be asked this one simple question.  If official Muslim history says Islam entered into Jerusalem during Mohammed's lifetime, how could al-Aqsa (The Farthest Mosque) possibly be in Jerusalem?  How could Mohammed visit a mosque that did not exist?

Concerning religion, one can argue whether Buddism's Mahabodhi Temple bears a real connection to the Budda or is primarily a British reconstruction, but Buddism does not rise or fall based on the Mahabodhi Temple.  Catholicism does not require Rome; during the 14th century, the pope was based in France.  Eastern Christianity does not require Constantinople.  Protestantism does not require Geneva.

But Islam's claim to al-Aqsa requires that a mosque existed in Jerusalem during Mohammed's lifetime.  Muslims even admit that the present al-Aqsa site was originally built in 705 AD, over seventy years after Mohammed's death.  Islam has a real problem.  Their own history contradicts their claim.

The mosque on the Temple Mount should therefore be referred to as "the Southern Mosque," given its location on the Temple Mount at the southern end.  No one should indulge this Islamic error.  Media commentators should be called out for even saying "al-Aqsa" at all.  Every Muslim must hear the truth – if not from their leaders, then from the West.

SOURCE

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The ‘Refugee Crisis’: Muslim History vs. Western Fantasy

Those who forget or ignore history are destined to be conquered by those who remember and praise it

Raymond Ibrahim

One of the primary reasons Islamic and Western nations are “worlds apart” is because the way they understand the world is worlds apart.  Whereas Muslims see the world through the lens of history, the West has jettisoned or rewritten history to suit its ideologies.

This dichotomy of Muslim and Western thinking is evident everywhere.  When the Islamic State declared that it will “conquer Rome” and “break its crosses,” few in the West realized that those are the verbatim words and goals of Islam’s founder and his companions as recorded in Muslim sources —words and goals that prompted over a thousand years of jihad on Europe.

Most recently, the Islamic State released a map of the areas it plans on expanding into over the next five years.  The map includes European nations such as Portugal, Spain, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Greece, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, Armenia, Georgia, Crete, Cyprus, and parts of Russia.

The reason these European nations are included in the Islamic State’s map is simple.  According to Islamic law, once a country has been conquered (or “opened,” as it’s called in the euphemistic Arabic), it becomes Islamic in perpetuity.

This, incidentally, is the real reason Muslims despise Israel.  It’s not due to sympathy for the Palestinians —if so, neighboring Arab nations would’ve absorbed them long ago (just as they would be absorbing all of today’s Muslim refugees).

No, Israel is hated because the descendants of “apes and pigs” —to use the Koran’s terminology —dare to rule land that was once “opened” by jihad and therefore must be returned to Islam.  (Read more about Islam’s “How Dare You?!” phenomenon to understand the source of Islamic rage, especially toward Israel.)

All the aforementioned European nations are also seen as being currently “occupied” by Christian “infidels” and in need of “liberation.”  This is why jihadi organizations refer to terrorist attacks on such countries as “defensive jihads.”

One rarely heard about Islamic designs on European nations because they are large and blocked together, altogether distant from the Muslim world.  Conversely, tiny Israel is right in the heart of the Islamic world—hence why most jihadi aspirations were traditionally geared toward the Jewish state: it was more of a realistic conquest.

Now, however, that the “caliphate” has been reborn and is expanding before a paralytic West, dreams of reconquering portions of Europe—if not through jihad, then through migration—are becoming more plausible, perhaps even more so than conquering Israel.

Because of their historical experiences with Islam, some central and east European nations are aware of Muslim aspirations.  Hungary’s prime minister even cited his nation’s unpleasant past under Islamic rule (in the guise of the Ottoman Empire) as reason to disallow Muslim refugees from entering.

But for more “enlightened” Western nations—that is, for idealistic nations that reject or rewrite history according to their subjective fantasies—Hungary’s reasoning is unjust, unhumanitarian, and racist.

To be sure, most of Europe has experience with Islamic depredations.  As late as the seventeenth century, even distant Iceland was being invaded by Muslim slave traders. Roughly 800 years earlier, in 846, Rome was sacked and the Vatican defiled by Muslim raiders.

Some of the Muslims migrating to Italy vow to do the same today, and Pope Francis acknowledges it.  Yet, all the same, he suggests that “you can take precautions, and put these people to work.”  (We’ve seen this sort of thinking before: the U.S. State Department cites a lack of “job opportunities” as reason for the existence of the Islamic State).

Perhaps because the U.K., Scandinavia, and North America were never conquered and occupied by the sword of Islam—unlike those southeast European nations that are resisting Muslim refugees—they feel free to rewrite history according to their subjective ideals, specifically, that historic Christianity is bad and all other religions and people are good (the darker and/or more foreign the better).

Indeed, countless are the books and courses on the “sins” of Christian Europe, from the Crusades to colonialism.  (Most recently, a book traces the rise of Islamic supremacism in Egypt to the disciplining of a rude Muslim girl by a European nun.)

This “new history”—particularly that Muslims are the historic “victims” of “intolerant” Western Christians—has metastasized everywhere, from high school to college and from Hollywood to the news media (which are becoming increasingly harder to distinguish from one another).

When U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama condemned medieval Christians as a way to relativize Islamic State atrocities—or at best to claim that religion, any religion, is never the driving force of violence—he was merely being representative of the mainstream way history is taught in the West.

Even otherwise sound books of history contribute to this distorted thinking.  While such works may mention “Ottoman expansion” into Europe, the Islamic element is omitted.  Thus Turks are portrayed as just another competitive people, out to carve a niche for themselves in Europe, no differently than rival Christian empires.   That the “Ottomans” (or “Saracens,” or “Arabs,” or “Moors,” or “Tatars”) were operating under the distinctly Islamic banner of jihad —just like the Islamic State is today —that connection is never made.

Generations of pseudo history have led the West to think that, far from being suspicious or judgmental of them, Muslims must be accommodated —say, by allowing them to migrate into the West in mass.  Perhaps then they’ll “like us”?

Such is progressive wisdom.

Meanwhile, back in the school rooms of much of the Muslim world, children continue to be indoctrinated in glorifying and reminiscing over the jihadi conquests of yore —conquests by the sword and in the name of Allah.  While the progressive West demonizes European/Christian history —when I was in elementary school, Christopher Columbus was a hero, when I got into college, he became a villain —Mehmet the Conqueror, whose atrocities against Christian Europeans make the Islamic State look like a bunch of boy scouts, is praised every year in “secular” Turkey on the anniversary of the savage sack of Constantinople.

The result of Western fantasies and Islamic history is that Muslims are now entering the West, unfettered, in the guise of refugees who refuse to assimilate with the “infidels” and who form enclaves, or in Islamic terminology, ribats —frontier posts where the jihad is waged on the infidel, one way or the other.

Nor is this mere conjecture.  The Islamic State is intentionally driving the refugee phenomenon and has promised to send half a million people —mostly Muslim—into Europe.  It claims that 4,000 of these refugees are its own operatives: “Just wait….  It’s our dream that there should be a caliphate not only in Syria but in all the world, and we will have it soon, inshallah [Allah willing].”

It is often said that those who ignore history are destined to repeat it.  What does one say of those who rewrite history in a way that demonizes their ancestors while whitewashing the crimes of their forebears’ enemies?

The result is before us.  History is not repeating itself; sword waving Muslims are not militarily conquering Europe.  Rather, they are being allowed to walk right in.

Perhaps a new aphorism needs to be coined for our times: Those who forget or ignore history are destined to be conquered by those who remember and praise it.

SOURCE

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Some history of the "Jim Crow" laws: They were Leftist laws



Leftists tend to object to points such as the above on the grounds that the Southern Democrats were in fact conservative -- as is allegedly shown by the strong showing that the GOP now has in the South.  But that is false. The Southern Democrats for the first two thirds of the 20th century may have differed in some ways from Northern Democrats but both were Leftist.  They both were anti-business and strong believers in government intervention in daily life.  The Jim Crow laws were one such intervention.  The Jim Crow laws were certainly different from current Democrat policies but in their own way they were just as much Big Government as the Democrat policies of today.

That great Leftist hero, FDR, was President in the Jim Crow era and he was the biggest interventionist since Lincoln -- and his base of support was in the South. He was notable for turning away Jews trying to flee Nazi Germany.  Fortunately, many Southerners seem to have learnt to distrust secular Messiahs eventually.


FDR vote in blue.  The South voted solid Leftist in the Jim Crow era

And that other great "progressive" hero of the Jim Crow era, Woodrow Wilson, was also solid in the South.  When he came to power as President he resegregated Washington government agencies, after the GOP had desegregated them.  He too was a Leftist racist


1912 election

And the Left are still racist to this day.  Affirmative action is nothing if not racist.  They will never realize Martin Luther King's dream.  King was a Republican, after all.

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